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Asian Music, Volume 46, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2015, pp. 3-38 (Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI7H[DV3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/amu.2015.0008
For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/amu/summary/v046/46.1.stirr.html
Access provided by University of Hawaii @ Manoa (1 Dec 2015 03:56 GMT) Sounding and Writing a Nepali Public Sphere: The Music and Language of Jhyāure
Anna Stirr
Abstract: This article examines how the interaction between the oral/aural and writ- ten aspects of language and song has shaped a modern Nepali-language public sphere and its uneasy relationship with the politics of difference and inequality in intimate life. To do so, it traces the history of the musical and poetic genre of jhyāure in Nepal and northern India, in music and literature from the early nineteenth century through the present, with a focus on how the demotic values associated with jhyāure and orality/au- rality have come to hold a significant place in an idea of Nepali national public space.
When I was in jail, I was the only one who could read and write. So it was my job to write letters for all of the other men. They would come and ask me to write a letter home to their sweethearts, and I would write down what they said on pa- per and then copy it over so it looked nice. . . . I wish I had been able to save those letters! They were all in songs, all in jhyāure. (Name withheld by request) In 2011, a politician from Syangja district, a member of the Nepal Commu- nist Party (United Marxist-Leninist), told me this story of his experiences as a political prisoner in a rural jail in the early 1980s.1 In his narrative, he styles himself as a mediator between his fellow political prisoners and their lovers, and also between written and oral media of communication. His surprise that the letters dictated to him were “all in songs” suggests that he, an edu- cated man, saw letters and songs as two separate genres, belonging to sepa- rate spheres. The men who dictated the letters, in contrast, saw jhyāure lyrics as the most appropriate way to send messages of love, whether their rhym- ing couplets were written or sung.2 Had they been in the same place as the ones they loved, the words of love would have been expressed in song. And if the men were illiterate, it is likely that the lovers to whom they sent letters
© 2015 by the University of Texas Press 4 Asian Music: Winter/Spring 2015 were as well. So the recipients of the letters would have heard the messages read by someone else: a letter reader analogous to their jailed sweethearts’ let- ter writer. Writing was a medium transmitting sounded messages, recorded on paper by the letter writer’s hand, and re-sounded at their destinations by those who read them to their intended recipients. While the literate politician might have found this surprising, this meeting of one man’s lettered world with the primarily sounded world of others illustrates an ongoing interaction between the oral/aural and written aspects of language and song, which has significantly shaped a modern Nepali-language public sphere and its uneasy relationship with the politics of difference and inequality in intimate life. Thelok or folk genres of Nepali poetry and song emphasize the sounded as- pects of language. Song dominates both the worlds of rural performance and the commercial music market in Nepal. Even the instrumental bands of the past two decades that are oriented toward the world music market primarily play instrumental versions of well-known folk songs.3 In Nepali folk poetry and folk song, which are hard to separate from each other, poetic play with language takes pride of place in performances that involve often-improvised lyrics sung to a set melody, instrumental accompaniment, dancing, flirting, and often eating and drinking. Although this primacy of language contrib- utes to naturali